Joanna Newsom floated onstage at the Bowery Ballroom on a snowy December evening in 2004, sat down at her harp, and flipped her long dirty-blond hair out of her face. The room fell silent. As she began to play songs off her first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, which had come out earlier in the year, there was the feeling that something very, very different was happening.
Newsom's songs creak like an antique music box, and her trademark craggy mezzo-soprano, coupled with the ethereal, sometimes ominous twang of her harp has her music falling somewhere between 12th-century troubadour songs, 78-rpm pop and Alan-Lomax-style field recordings. As for the lyrics, her ballads are filled with tummies aching from eating bumblebees; irritable, caged canaries; inflammatory writs; cold compresses being laid on messes; and damnable bells. Her command of the English language is deft, eloquent without showing off. Like reading To the Lighthouse or seeing a Björk music video for the first time, beholding this warbling 22-year-old was like watching the system shake, delicately but firmly.
Joanna Newsom is a wood nymph clad in Sonia Rykiel. On the one hand, the harp virtuoso, singer-songwriter, and accidental indie-rock poster girl peppers her songs with the aforementioned, non-21st-century themes. "In high school, people used to refer to me as 'New to the World,'" she recalls, due to her overarched posture and propensity for toting a parasol, wearing costume-y outfits and carrying a backpack that her friend brought her back from Africa. "There goes New to the World," people in younger grades would say as the teenage harpist walked by. Before meeting her, I had a hard time imagining her, say, operating a microwave or watching a VH1 reality show. But throughout our interview, Newsom sprinkles the conversation with an Office reference one moment ("That's what she said," she mutters quickly, quietly and familiarly when I bite off a piece of chocolate that I determine to be too big for my mouth) and the fact that she's memorized Marc Jacobs's 2002 Spring and Fall collection the next. You should see her Christian Louboutin heels.
Joanna wears a dress by Rodarte and shoes by Christian Louboutin for Rodarte. Makeup: Lancôme. Fragrance: Vera Wang Princess.
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